


good clean fun

by Aris



Series: bad habits [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Depression, Drug Use, Estimeric Week 2020, Estinien angst, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, estinien-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25802119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: Aymeric kisses the edge of his mouth like a promise. Estinien lights his cigarette for him, because of course he does, and it’s all smiles smiles smiles, passing the can between one another, watching the two or three stars that have escaped the city smog above them.He thinks: I want this forever.
Relationships: Aymeric de Borel/Estinien Wyrmblood
Series: bad habits [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871950
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16
Collections: Estimeric Week 2020





	good clean fun

**Author's Note:**

> This fic references heroin smoking and injecting but in no specific detail. Highs also have limited description to avoid triggering/romanticisation.
> 
> Also included: smoking, weed, drinking as a coping mechanism (while of age and underage, brief)
> 
> Take care!
> 
> [title cred](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWaez91XCiQ)

The first time he tries heroin, he’s twenty, and not half as sober as he should be.

He’s at a house-party, a near permanent state of affairs since he’d been thrown into a twelve-man flat for his first year of university with everyone else who couldn’t afford the on-campus flats. The small space made it difficult to want to ever be home - so, house-parties. Called that, like any of them own an entire house, and not some scruffy brutalist ground floor apartment or one-third of a greying 2000’s semi-attached house that might not have been so bad before a landlord chopped it into an ugly, barely livable space with a butchered extension job for a kitchen. Estinien is _not_ bitter.

House-party, they call them, like they’re living in one of those red-cup alcohol films, with the cat-ear halloween costumes and the convertible cars. It is incredibly rose-tinted, but there’s not much else to name them without trying too hard.

Estinien didn’t much like house-parties before University, didn’t like much of anything, really, which isn’t something he tries to lurk on too often. Or -- likes to think he doesn’t, as if he hadn’t spent every day of his life since he was twelve brewing up a storm he couldn’t quite catch shelter from. He didn’t like house-parties, wasn’t invited to them, besides, but he liked to drink just fine. Stolen beers from Alberics’ six-packs he never kept proper tabs on, or bottles bought at the shop in the underpass who didn’t bother with ID. Artimage-something-something, out of place for the store, whose entire back wall was tobacco cabinets and novelty hanging lighters, pin up girls staring him down everytime he bought a forty.

Beer, when you drink enough of it, when you’re fourteen and less concerned by drowning in your own personal storm, and more concerned with stemming the bleeding of a wound you cannot see, but only feel -- when you drink enough of it, then, it’s a wonderful, fleeting bandaid. Or - just alcohol, straight to the wound. Something dirty, like whisky, where you half stop to wonder if whatever makes it so amber should be sloshing around the sides of your tendons, spilling into perforations in your veins. Stinging, numbing, a little bit damaging. Pleasing.

He didn't like it when he first tried it, and he doesn’t like it now. It’s cheap, and everyone is liable to have a can or two at the very least. Let it not be said that he is picky with his drinking, not that he’s anything but an booze-opportunist. He takes his comforts where they are readily available, easily accessible, and, disappointing to anyone who expects anything from him. 

So, he still drinks his beer, six years later, so the nightmares don’t catch him by the ankles, so the anxiety doesn’t buzz so harshly in his chest, so he doesn’t collapse into the sick little excavation project in his head like so many badly stacked cards,

(The nightmares keep getting worse and worse. He used to take medication, when he was younger, but all it did was empty him from the inside out. But, he thinks, that was the point: when a fruit rots, it does so from the core. 

He scraped away at the outer layers, peeled and burnt and scratched at the skin, anything to dig deep enough to to hit that first hint of blackened flesh. A ruin he knew well, take it from the inside, hold it on the outside, and then he’s not so fucking wrong anymore. No one has to guess, anymore.

Medically gutted. With a surgical fruit knife. Leave only the skin, boil it to a jam. Chewed up and spat out, he’s gagging on the stem they left behind.)

House-parties are fine, now. Homey, even, when the alternative is twelve adolescents in a kitchen trying to make ten different meals, and although Estinien hasn’t had to deal with that for some years now, the memory is fresh in his mind. But the roots he’d put down in his first year remain strong, and his and Aymeric’s apartment is as often empty as it is full with all the other bodies from the shows they frequent. The neighbours would complain, if they weren’t the same. 

This time, he’s not sure whose house this is, but he came over with Aymeric and Haurechfant, and he’s pretty sure Hilda is here, too, and that she smoked with them all in the cramped bathroom, laughing and shushing like everyone there wasn’t already on something. But that could have been another night, all the dissected little _student homes_ bleeding into each other in this part of the city.

Estinien doesn’t know the last time he was sober, and he does not intend for it to be soon. This is where he makes his first mistake:

Haurechant really likes coke, because he’s a rich kid, and that's the kind of shit rich kids are born into. Cocaine and money. Interchangeable, really. Stephanivien is his dealer, both as long-legged and western european as the other, french students pissing their money away at some fancy University across the city Estinien couldn’t buy fucking lunch at, even with the student discount. Haurchefant would probably buy it for him anyway, if he weren’t half-way through being cut off.

(He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he’s started snagging GPCs when offered and isn’t so fussy about drinking from plastic bottles, so it must not be doing so well. Estinien wants to comfort him, but between coke and Aymeric, it seems pretty covered. He gives him his shitty cigarettes, anyway, though he’s not convinced they’re helping anyone.)

So, when Stephanivien swans over, Estinien turns down the coke, but also a little bit because Aymeric bust his money on it last week and they’ve got rent, still. But the guys got a whole spiel for something else and -- Estinien hears him out. He’s saying ‘you can’t take too much when you smoke’ he’s saying, ‘all the bad bits are from injecting’, he’s saying ‘it’ll feel like nothing else you’ve ever tried, dude’. And yeah. Estinien isn’t a hard sell, hasn’t slept will in weeks, and he’s not so stupid he doesn’t know it’s a bad idea. The area he grew up in was strewn with the consequences.

It’s just - fuck. Right? That’s what he sits down and says after a long smoking session when someone starts talking about feelings. The universe. Just - fuck. It means a whole lot, and mostly nothing. He could start crying, or laughing, or staring down at the badly plastered wall, and they’d get it.

But not really. So, Stephanivien rolls it out with some foil and a practiced ease that goes too fast to have him second guess. It’s free, because Stephanivien is wearing an honest to god fully-buttoned, freshly ironed, _shirt_ at a party that continued on from a lowkey bar room folk set, and that means he isn’t some postcode-locked loser with a shaky connection or two in the city over. First one is free, then they ramp up the price til they’re fish hooked.

Landlord and drug dealers, the same kind of scum, but at least one will still pretend to care after two missed payments. 

Estinien is handed some foil and a score. And then he’s clapped on the back, told to run a lighter and inhale, and Stephaniviens’ gone - making a bee-line for a very drunk, very uninterested Hilda. Estinien watches with some kind of lackadaisical amusement as Joye slips up behind her partner, but loses focus on the ensuing conversation when Aymeric slings down next to him. 

He’s flushed up to his eyes and smells strongly of whiskey, but all he can focus on is how blue his eyes look bloodshot. 

Aymerics like -- he’s so pretty, it’s not fair. The kind of pretty people write poems about, though all Estinien can manage is shitty fucking songs about drowning, or something. In his eyes, of course, because they’re blue, and there isn’t a cliche in the world he’d miss for those eyes. Sapphires, gems, sweet fields of cornflowers, hydrangeas, iris’s, pools in caves so deep in the earth they haven’t been named yet. When he smiles, something lights up, floaty and happy and shining and _gold,_ something that warms his bones from the marrow out. 

Estinien could go on and on. He does, frequently, and Aymeric smothers his laughs into his neck every time. He almost wishes he weren’t so drunk all the time, so he could have every detail etched into his head. It’s not the same.

He kisses him, because he’s there, and the foil crinkles in his hand when Aymeric tries to hold it and - he remembers. 

They smoke it on the roof of whoevers apartment building, burning the first few beads, and yeah -- Stephanivien was right. It’s like nothing he’s ever felt. Like his spine is honey pouring down a silken sheet. Like a desert of soft opals is shifting upon his skin. Content, relaxed, and the whole world is, too. Aymeric points out every single star he knows, even the ones Estinien can’t see, and some he’s not sure exist.

It doesn't matter, not really.

And then it’s the next afternoon, and he’s still out of it from the beer, and he smokes another few beads outside the fire exit of the small venue they’re playing at. It does nothing for his hangover. This time, Hauchefant holds the lighter, and they all gather round like they’ve found one of the wonders of the world among their hands. It might just be, really, and the set is like sugar, and stage-lights, and one of the girls Heustinne brings around yells when he trips over the mic wire. Covers of The Taxpayers have never sounded so good. They light the rest after the set, and Aymeric burns his wrist when they rip the foil.

He kisses it better. Hauerchfant wrinkles his nose.

It’s later, when things slow, when the different highs begin to wane and the buzz of the beer picks up again, that he slumps down on his couch.

“Roll me one,” Aymeric whispers in his ear, and if Estinien wasn’t such an obvious fucking fool for being head-over-heels at just twenty, his smile would’ve betrayed him. There’s a shiver at his neck, one that tingles until the end of his fingers when Aymeric brushes them with his own, setting down an empty can and wandering over to the kitchen counter. He tips his back on the couch, watches Aymeric’s back as he cracks another one open one-handed, the other squeezing Haucherfants’ arm.

His cheeks are flushed, but there's a hazy set to his smile that makes Estinien pleased in that possessive, lazy kind of way. The kind of way that makes him want to run his hands through those silky, curly locks, the kind that makes him want to trace the contours of his fingers, map the length of his spine with his tongue.

Aymeric catches his eyes, and mimes smoking. Estinein grins back, and Haucherfants’ laugh must be pitched down from the throat strain, but the emotion is unmistakable. He can’t hear him over the music someone’s blasting.

He sways up from the back of the couch to roll on the coffee table, a glorified pallet they’d spilt varnish on more than really paint, and his fingertips are still numb from the set they’d played. He accounts for it with a well-practiced ease, and by the time he’s done, Aymerics’ tugging at his arm to stand.

They topple together, and he can see Heustienne is pointing him out to her friends as he cracks upon the balcony door. He throws her the finger, and Aymeric grabs his hand down to intertwine it with his, saying something to him he can’t make out. But his palm is warm, and he doesn’t see Heustienne rude gesture back, gaze stuck back on the man before him.

This close, there could be a halo above his head, and he thinks, dreamily, it’s the only thing he’d ever kneel for.

“Right here?” Aymeric asks, and Estinien had not meant to say that out loud, but coherent thought escapes him before he can even grasp for it. He’s floaty, feels the music vibrating in his solar plexus, and god, he’s so lucky to have this. All of this. His friends, his beer, the high he’s been riding since 11am, his shitty, scratched up guitar and Aymeric. So, so lucky.

A pull on his jacket lapels brings him up, and those blue eyes are suddenly so close, he says -

“Later?” And Aymeric kisses the edge of his mouth like a promise. Estinien lights his cigarette for him, because of course he does, and it’s all smiles smiles smiles, passing the can one another, watching the two or three stars that have escaped the city smog above them.

He thinks: I want this forever.

  
  


(The last time he does heroin, he nods off with a needle in his thigh, and wakes up alone and bloody.

  
  


He hasn’t seen Aymeric in over 11 years.)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my contribution for [Estimeric week day 1 - Firsts.](https://twitter.com/estimericweek1) I have a fic coming for day 3, as well as some art, so stay tuned c:
> 
> BUT this is also a introduction to my (folk) punk AU ^_^ you can find the series [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871950), and i'll start having chapters up after i finish splintered kneecaps
> 
> [punk au playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7lzcBPohYojicxJeFBbHD0?si=aKzeG0yeQ2ytczJX68RMNA)  
> [my twitter](https://twitter.com/insalte)
> 
> [bookclub discord](https://discord.gg/EfbBeBf%22)


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